S.e.A.rCh

Is Your GeoTargeting Screwed?

So I had suddenly had one of those rare moments that I thought was quite clever that I’d quite like to share with everyone.  It’s amazing how many big companies really screw up their geotargeting by hosting all regional content on a .com, and then do absolutely nothing to ensure that their content ranks regionally.  Imagine if you could find websites that do this, and then you let them know that they could increase their traffic by 10-20%.  I’m sure there’s a decent packet to be made out of that.

Anyway, here’s how I’d do it.  I’d do a search using Google for .com domains, that have UK specific sections on their websites.  You can get to the query I’d use here, but the results should look something like this:

So as you can see, you should see global sites with UK specific sections.  Then what you can do is for each of those domains, check to see whether they rank in Google UK, with a UK Tick.  Not sure what I mean?  I’m talking about searching for sites when you’ve got the radio button below highlighted:

So let’s do this with a worked example.  Mcafee ranks for my original query, on the URL www.mcafee.com/uk/.  Now if I select the “pages from the UK” radio button, and do a search for Mcafee, my results look as follows:

That Mcafee URL no longer appears – in fact, it doesn’t appear within the first 100 results.  Why is that?  It’s because they’re not geotargeting their regional content correctly.  It gets even more interesting when you start to consider the amount of traffic Mcafee might be losing out on.  Using Google Trends, we can see that worldwide, Mcafee.com is getting about 300k visitors a day at the moment:

You can dig a little deeper, and filter just by UK based traffic:

So Mcafee.com is getting just under 20k visitors a day from the UK.  I’m going to make a fairly large assumption here.   I’m going to assume that Google Trends data only accounts for referrals sent via Google’s organic listings.  As Mcafee doesn’t rank in Google UK with a UK tick, we know that it must be missing out on a significant amount of traffic.  I wonder how much that would account for?  According to this Hitwise post from 2008, 13.6% of Google UK searches are with a UK tick.  That means that those 20k UK visitors account for 86.3% of Mcafee’s potential UK traffic – the rest is just being lost.  The amount being lost works out as being 3148 visitors a day, or 95k visits a month,  or  1.1 million visits a year.  ALL LOST! Obviously I’ve not accounted for seasonality here.

I’d hate to think how much total traffic is being lost by major brands because they’ve not sorted localised geotargeting on their domains, and even worse than that, the total monetized value of all that traffic.  Considering how easy it is to rectify this problem (although I’m not going to tell you here how to do it) it’s a crying shame that this is happening.  Now if only I could get my hands on that traffic…

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Tags: geotargeting